Galerie im Taxispalais

KRIWET – Yester 'n' Today

Ferdinand Kriwet is a media art pioneer. He was ahead of his time: as early as the 1960s he was using exhibitions, stage appearances and radio plays to address our seeing habits as influenced by sensory overload from the mass media and to analyse the language of television, advertising and photography. In the post-war period, literature was looking for forms of expression that were in tune with the times, in the same way as fine art, which increasingly made use of new media from the 1950s onwards. For Kriwet, who describes himself as a visual poet and writer, language operates not just with words, but also with images. Kriwet worked as a wide-ranging mixed media artist in the Rhineland, which was a centre for art, from the 1960s to the 1980s. He designed neon lettering, mural paintings and signage systems for public places, produced numerous radio programmes and designed art in building projects before gradually withdrawing from the art business in the late 1980s.

Kriwet’s roots are to be found in Concrete Poetry, a literary movement that had been emerging since about 1950, which uses language’s visual and acoustic properties for artistic purposes. At the same time as Kriwet was producing his first work as an artist, including the Rundscheiben (Circular Discs) series, which features texts without a beginning or an end, and without any prescribed direction in which to read them, the legendary Vienna Group was forming in Austria. Its protagonists H.C. Artmann, Konrad Bayer, Gerhard Rühm and Oswald Wiener also used language as a universal model for constructing reality and at an early stage devised conceptual positions that radically broke down the boundaries of the contemporary aesthetic consensus. The personal show devoted to Ferdinand Kriwet is rooted historically not just in Austria, but particularly in Innsbruck: the artist and theoretician Heinz Gappmayr, who was close to Kriwet in Visual Poetry, worked in Innsbruck until he died last year, and Ferdinand Kriwet himself featured in the Visual Poetry exhibition in the Galerie im Taxispalais as early as 1968.

The KRIWET – Yester 'n' Today exhibition, which is organized retrospectively, presents a comprehen-sive survey of Kriwet’s complex oeuvre for the first time in Austria. His Hör- and Sprechtexte (Radio and Language Texts), publications, film and television work, neon pieces and a mixed media installation conceived especially for the show will appear as well as the first Rundscheiben. This means we are showing the work of an artist who addressed the significance of media competence from the very start of our society’s immersion in the mass media, and whose work is more relevant than ever today, in the internet age.

Ferdinand Kriwet
Born 1942 in Düsseldorf, lives in Dresden
Numerous international and group exhibitions, including 2009 On the Margins of Art. Creation and Political Engagement, MACBA, Barcelona; 2008 5th Berlin Biennale, Berlin; 1977 documenta 6, Kassel; 1962 Lettering by Modern Artists, MoMa, New York.
 
A joint project with the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf